Building Teams- Dysfunctions to be Wary of

A few years ago I have read “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by J-B Lencioni series. I found a lot of wisdom in it and through my experiences I have came to realize that it is absolutely true and many fall for it. One of the interesting concepts that the book tackled with the idea of your “First Team”. I see many managers fall into this one. Nearly any manager will answer this question while referring to their direct reports that they lead. The problem with this is that our direct reports should be our “second team” and not the first. Instead, our “First Team” should be the team of your peers of managers. Simply put, when a company has a collection of managers who fail in acting as a team and do not prioritize that team, it creates a whole plethora of issues. Let’s take the following examples: 

a) The sales team in the organization quotes the customer a solution that is competitive at an extremely cheap price. They secure a large order from their customer and thus they have achieved their department goals. The project is then kicked to engineering and engineering looks at what was quoted and realize that the quote skips critical costs related to achieving compliance, mandatory testing, uses the wrong part numbers that would not be suitable for the application. To avoid warranty claims and putting unsafe products on the market, the engineering team do their due diligence which eats most of the projected profits up. The CEO is furious and wants to know how this happened. The sales team point the finger towards engineering and says we did our job, it is engineering that failed to do theirs. Engineering explains why the quote was bad and how things needed to be different. The CEO then goes to the customer to renegotiate trying to recoup some of the cost. While they succeed, they lose their customer future business because the customer did not like feeling tricked into giving them the bid and then having to pay more later because of internal struggles. The company does not meet its targets next year, lay offs occur, the CEO and executive staff are replaced. 

b) A multidisciplinary product development team is working on developing a product for a customer. The electronics team keep updating their designs without informing and consulting software or system. The software team prioritizes requests for implementation from the customer and ignores the needs of the other teams. The prototype team priorities shipping parts to the customer and ignore the need of the test team for parts to test. The quality team keeps telling everyone that they are not adhering to the process and that they are prioritizing the wrong thing by shipping things to the customer without testing or documenting the work first. The customer discover a whole lot of issue and escalate it to the CEO who holds an emergency meeting to get to the bottom of this only to see all his managers pointing fingers towards each other. The project ends up being late, a lot of rework needs to be done and the company loses money on the project.

When managers prioritize our direct reports, they tend to defend them and try to protect them from all culpability for the sake of meeting perceived objectives. However, by failing to collaborate as managers to achieve the bigger picture, the managers have hurt the company and inadvertently their own teams who will have to suffer lay offs, wage losses, low or no bonuses,…etc. But why is this happening?

Dysfunction 1: Absence of trust

When we do not know each other well, we tend to be cautious from one another. When we all are competitive and seek to distinguish ourselves, we tend to be secretive and selfish and don’t care about our counterparts. This dynamic creates an absence of trust which makes it impossible to achieve any teamwork. achieving a vulnerability based trust is extremely difficult because we tend to be competitive and cautious of other. That lack of trust leads to us spending time in too many meetings discussing how to mange our interactions and throwing responsibility around. There is even the mentality of “Whoever says their is a problem, owns the problem”. We are tend to be too selfish and focused on our perceptive brand and our team of direct reports that we lose sight of the bigger picture. We conceal our mistakes, do not ask or provide feedback, jump to conclusions, waste time, hold grudges and dread meetings. When what we should be doing is admit mistakes, ask for help, ask clarifying questions, look forward to collaboration and be willing to take risks. Many try to overcome this by taking personality tests and holding offsite meetings to try to build that connection. 

Dysfunction 2: Fear of conflict

There is always that one or two people in the room who are the loudest and most pushy. Whenever there is someone senior in the room, many shy out of specking up lest they sound stupid or say the wrong thing or disagree with the big boss. We become afraid of conflict. Conflict is stressful, it is not fun, it is frustrating, may lead us to be unprofessional and get us in trouble. So we avoid it. I have witnessed this in particular with a cultural difference between American and Swedish engineers. The Swedish engineers have the culture of discussing thing until all points are addressed and everyone agrees on the resolution. They engage in healthy productive conflict as they prefer to do the right thing even if it means being late. The American engineers on the other hand, while they also want to do the right thing, are more concerned about doing something. They want to jump into action. Their entrepreneurial spirit takes over and with the mentality of if it does not work we will revisit it they charge. When working with a team that engages both sides of the Atlantic, I have found that the American engineers stampede over the Swedish engineers to which point the Swedish engineers went silent. They understood their American counterparts just do not value their opinion or want to listen. So they avoided conflict even though they know productive conflict was a must but the environment was not conducive of it. When you have an environment with fear of conflict you have boring meetings, lots of politics, and do not engage in healthy debate. When teams engage in productive conflict, the meeting are interesting, more working meetings occur, problems, ae solved faster, and politics are minimized. As leaders, we should encourage people to speak up and we should demonstrate restraint to le the conflicts run their course. naturally some conflict resolution management is called for but be careful. 

Dysfunction 3: Lack of commitment

To get commitment, you generally need two things: Buy-in and clarity. Great teams seek the input of all members, evaluate all options objectively and ensure that clarity and buy in are achieved. Without clarity and buy-in, you get team members unsure of direction and priorities, embark on excessive analyses, stand still unsure of what their contribution is, and wait on other members to be done with their parts instead of offering a hand. One way to address this is to take time at the end of the meeting to reviewed the key decisions and direction made during the meeting and what needs to be communicated to the individual teams and the deliverables. Deadlines should be set and metrics to measure progress so that managers can ask for help if they will be late. Estimating both best and worst case scenarios is critical to determine the critical path and set expectations. 

Dysfunction 4: Avoiding accountability

I cannot emphasis how much this is predominant now in our culture. We have evolved into reassigning blame to everyone and avoid accountability both in our personal and professional lives. While this is part of it, in the context of the team, it also means being comfortable calling out others whose lack of commitment and performance is hurting the team. While we generally hate the term peer pressure, it is exactly that is what is needed to hold each other to high standard and expectations. Simple ways to manage this are to make all goals and progression public for all to see and to have regular reviews. Word of caution to managers is to be careful of turning into micromanagers or overdoing the reviews. You want to empower your team to do the right things and be accountable but you do not want to miss problems by being too trusting either. 

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to results. 

This goes back to our earlier examples, when we focus on our own objectives and miss the team objective. Who cares if you made the greatest bolt in the world if you cannot make the car run? The teams should minimize individualistic behaviors, celebrate team success, seek to grow together and avoid distractions. Team result based rewards can be a strong motivator if it becomes the norm over individual successes. 

In summary, we as managers should learn to be a team together and focus on the company objectives as well as be careful of the 5 dysfunctions and be intentional about tackling them.